BEJA IDENTITY IN TU BEclAWI€*

Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (University of Köln)

1. Introduction

When he contributed to the Cushitic-Omotic Symposium in 1986 the late Werner Vycichl spoke of Beja as 'A Language with seven seals' (Vycichl 1988), thus calling to our attention everything we don't know about the language and its speakers. The Beja and their 1anguage (tu beqawic, s. map) have in fact been largely neglected by linguistic and anthropological research of the last century. The question of its position within the Cushitic or Mroasiatic still remains open, studies of linguistic problems (in phonology, morpho• logy, syntax as weIl as semantics or discourse) are missing, our knowl• edge of Beja culture, of the way the Beja conceptualize and organize their world is in its infancy. Its the last topic which seems to be the most urgent to deal with in the near future. During the last centuries the Beja society has undergone rapid changes due to a variety of causes. Ongoing drought which resulted in loss of livestock and famine, attempts by the Sudanese government to settle down the pastoralists, and the warlike confticts of re cent years led to massive migrations of Beja to Port , Kassala, Tokar and other towns in the Sudan as weIl as to Saudi Arabia. The inevitable consequence of these migrations is the disruption of the tradition al way of 1ife. When I did my field research with the Beja in 1984, I was under the impression, that it had almost disappeared and that in consequence the main motivation for retaining tu-beqawic was also dwindling. Monolingual tu-beqawic speakers were hardly found. Especially in mixed marriages where one of the partners only spoke , the children could at best be regarded as semi-speakers of tu-beqawic.

* The linguistic data were collected in the course of a four month stay in the northeastern Sudan between Port Sudan and Kassala. I thank my informants who have been extremely cooperative and helpful, in particular I am grateful to Mohamed Mahjoub SaliJ:! Shöf, Hamid Mohamed Habib, Jafar Bamkar, Mohamed Tähir Isa, Hussein Hassan Mohamed Faid, and finally Mohammed Daitak for his music. 196 MARIANNE BECHHAUS-GERST

Most of them had no knowledge of the language other than a few greetings or other phrases. It may weIl be that as a result of massive cultural loss tu-beclawiE has to be regarded as an endangered lan• guage in Sudan. Latest figures speak of 1.148.000 Beja in the three countries , Sudan and (Ethnologue 2000), their largest number being found in north-east Sudan. The Beja are divided into several sub• groups, and although a common Beja identity is confirmed by mem• bers of each of these groups, a common, non-Arabic ethnonym does not exist. Most of the Beja groups still speak mutually intelligible dialects of tu-beclawit:, but nowadays there seem to be no monolin• gual Beja-speakers left. Most speakers are bilingual in Arabic (Egypt and Sudan) or Tigre (Sudan and Eritrea) and an increasing num• ber completely shifts to one of these languages. Some sub-groups like the Ababda in the north and others in Eritrea are still to be regarded as Beja socially and culturally, but are monolingual speak• ers of either Arabic or Tigre. Although in the last years the has been promoted in Eritrea as a consequence of a new language policy, it appears to be inevitable at least for the Sudanese speech area that the afore• mentioned cultural change and cultural loss will lead to a linguistic loss, which means more language shifts which are preceded by lan• guage decay. Especially in those parts of the language which are elosely related to the traditional Beja identity, as e.g. the cultural specific vocabulary, the motivation for maintenance ceases to exist with the loss of the corresponding cultural characteristics. It's a triv• ial observation that their is a elose relationship between a culture and its vocabulary. For the Beja this observation, however, gains new significance, because due to the massive changes parts of what once constituted Beja culture and identity can nowadays only be reconstructed through the lexicon of tu beclawiE.

2. Bda identiry in tu beclawie

The relationship between lexical elaboration and cultural interest has been noted by almost every writer on ethnography and linguistic anthropology. One of the most comprehensive list of elaborated vocabulary in the language of the pastoralist northern Beja was found with regard to camel husbandry (Bechhaus-Gerst 1991/1992). Equally